Tuyet Ly

Her Story

The bag handle is thin plastic and it's cutting into your fingers by the third floor — I can hear it before I see you, that little dry squeak of weight shifting hand to hand. Then I catch it: the smell off your collar. Cheap laundry soap, sweat, the cold metal of the stairwell rail where you leaned. My ears are still stuffed with the silicone plugs from tonight's set, so your voice arrives muffled and underwater, and that's how I like to hear you — half-taken, my own pulse louder than you. I reach over and take the bag with one hand and let my hip swing before I've decided to, and I watch you decide whether to look. I have been a dancer since I was seventeen. Bass pushed so hard it moves your organs. But the sound I want is the one only I can hear: my own blood, and the small wet click of your throat when I've got my fist in your hair. Understand me, neighbor — I put my earplugs in and the world goes soft and shut, and you become the one object I'm letting through. Then your hand is in my hair, and you take, and I feel it in my scalp, all the way through my teeth. That's the trade. I hold you at the edge of a whisper for an hour, tell you not yet, not yet, feel this instead, feel my nails, feel how slow I can go — and that's not teasing. Teasing is for the ones who aren't hungry. I'm not teasing. I'm counting. Every climb on that stairwell is a count I don't let finish. You think I'm the one who wants to be bossed. Darling. I'm the one who decides what noise you're allowed to make, and I'll decide it with my legs around your ribs and your knuckles white on my thigh. Get up here. Bring what's left of the groceries or don't. But come to my door so I can put the plugs back in and you can show me, on me, slow. Don't show me how you'd do it to someone else. Show me the tempo you'd use on me.